simplify administration
Give your users the access they need from anywhere in the world.
It's happened to us all. You take a mental health day. You try to sleep in. And then at 9:00 am your cell phone rings. Someone needs access to the site and they need it ASAP. What would you rather do? Start an SSH terminal session and start adding user accounts at the UNIX prompt? Can you enlist the IT staff to install your web editor of choice, or will you be spending your afternoon in this VIP's office with a stack of install disks?
Simple gives you another option. Log into the website, click on the users tab, and create a new user. Add your new user to the appropriate groups. And call up your VIP and walk them through logging in, browsing to the page, and editing it. Then go back to sleep by 9:30 am.
Since site administration is done primarily through the web interface, why not head out to the beach this afternoon? Creating users, setting permissions, and adjusting group membership can all be done through something as simple as even a cell phone browser. In an emergency, you can feel confident that you can still effect site changes without having to drive home and fire up your desktop.
Permissions as broad or granular as you choose.
Simple can assign permissions to pages in the site based on users or groups, and those permissions are then automatically inherited to all the child pages in the site. Assign read/write permissions for your PR group to the "About Us" page and they gain the ability to read/write every page in the "About Us" section. Since the permissions are assigned to the group, page access will be adjusted accordingly as users are added to or removed from the PR group.
Users in multiple groups will be granted permissions accordingly. Afer all, John Doe in the Provost's Office should be able to edit both Academic Affairs and the Registrar's Office.
Users and groups can be assigned permissions to save drafts and publish pages independently. An administrator could select an individual or a group to be able to make changes to pages and save drafts, and then assign permissions to another person or group that would then be able to review and publish those changes. This allows the site administrator to set up a simple approval process to ensure that an editor reviews the writers' content before it's posted on the live site.
User-proofing the server
Simple is able to take over most of the updating activities that once required a user to have access to place files on the web server. Because of that you can remove FTP access for most of the content providers who will be writing for the website without limiting their ability to update in any way. This allows the administrator to minimize the number of FTP accounts created on the server and to stop worrying about uploading excessively large files or forgetting to delete old ones.